Friday, September 5, 2014

Every year for our anniversary I try to recreate portions of our wedding meal. We cooked all of our own food at our wedding and we only had a small personal wedding so we were able to do a more elaborate meal.

Two of Bill’s favourite meals are veal cutlets and cabbage rolls. My favourites are mostly seafood and salads. So a menu was planned around these foods. We cheated for the wedding and bought pre made ready to cook veal cutlets. These days I prefer to make my own from scratch as I have since found out I have Celiac disease.

The cabbage rolls I will make for another meal so they can be enjoyed themselves. We had a few friends who brought some of the salads for us too. The remainder of the meal we prepared the night before the wedding. Then it was easy to serve the rest of the meal. My Uncle John barbecued the veal cutlets and the rest of my family put the food out. That is the only change I would have made to my wedding. In hind site I would have hired a couple of helpers to cook, unwrap and serve dinner, and drinks. They could also do the cleanup which my Mom did plenty of.

Our complete wedding meal consisted of veal cutlets with Pernod sauce, cabbage rolls (Bill’s mom made the cabbage rolls). Then we had fresh spot prawns boiled to perfection. My cousin donated five lobster to hat he took care of cooking and serving. He was also on standby to help the guys tie their ties.We also had Moroccan Rice Pilaf, Caesar salad, coleslaw, potato salad marinated vegetable salad and platters of assorted desserts. We all baked for a few weeks so we just had a huge platter of goodies and of course wedding cake (which I made myself) I have a funny story about my wedding cake, I have made a few for many people over the years but I had many problems making my own. First you have to understand that Bill and I were together for many years before we got married and when we did decide to get married we did everything in three weeks. When I started baking my cake layers I went simple and used cake mixes, and how hard can that be. First try the element went in the oven, which meant that the cakes cooked from the top down under the broiler. Needless to say they were burned on the top and raw on the bottom. so we fixed the oven and I attempted try two. This time for some reason I dropped the biggest layer of cake which consisted of two whole cake mixes. This resulted in try number three. All in all I used 9 cake mixes to make one cake for my own wedding. The worst thing (and most stressful) was when my dad cut me out a Plexiglas heart to go between the layers. I had clear pillars to go between the two Plexiglas hearts and used crazy glue to hold them together. Now most of know how quickly crazy glue takes hold, my problem is that the night before my wedding I glued my fingers together around the pillars. I could just picture myself with my fingers wrapped around my cake stand during my vows. If you have read my first post about my anniversary you would also have read about our on other funny happening at our wedding.

Most years for our anniversary we have at least a few of the dishes from our wedding. This year I chose to make a prawn cocktail as our first course. I cooked the pawns using my sisters method which I blogged about a while ago. The tutorial can be found at my blog post Perfect Prawns. I chose to make prawn cocktail so I could use the shrimp cocktail dishes that I inherited from my Gram.

These are two of the cocktail glasses that my gram gave me before she passed. They are one of my most precious gifts.

As a girl I was totally amazed that my Gram had dishes that had the sole purpose of serving shrimp cocktail salads. I do not use them often as they are so important to me. I am not usually like that, I use all of my dishes frequently even the treasured ones. If we live life waiting for special occasion’s life will pass us by and we will never have used the special things, but these dishes are very fragile and they are the last thing my Gram ever gave me. They are very beautiful. I have two blue and two green dishes. They come in two parts the bottom half that you fill with crushed ice to keep the cocktail cold and the top half that you put the salad in.

To make a cocktail salad you add head lettuce that is cut into shreds in the bottom of the cup, which you wash and chill with ice so that it is very crisp. Then you put it in the cocktail glass. It is then topped with shrimp, crab, lobster or prawns. It is then served with cocktail sauce. I used jarred sauce as it is very good and does not require being made from scratch. My husband does not like the sauce so he used thousand island dressing.ur next course was a Caesar salad (I used a bagged mix) topped with king crab meat as I was unable to get lobster. This was the only thing I would have changed about our dinner. The packaged salad was not very good. I know better, I should have made my salad from scratch. The crab did make it worth eating, but the Caesar salad was very disappointing.

Our third course was veal cutlets with Pernod Sauce. I made a gluten free breading for the cutlets. The Pernod sauce I used a packaged au jus mix and added two tablespoons of Pernod liquor. On the side I made the Moroccan rice pilaf mentioned above. I have included the recipe here, Moroccan Rice Pilaf

As a vegetable for the main course I finished the meal with honey cinnamon glazed carrots. I was not crazy over this recipe so I will not include it. I did learn something new cooking them though that is worth sharing. I have always made my roast carrots by roasting them in a pan uncovered. This recipe directed me to place the carrots in a single layer on a parchment covered pan and to cover it with foil for the first 30 minutes until the carrots were soft. Then to turn on the broiler for ten minutes to finish them. It worked great, but I thought the carrots were too sweet and too rich with the cinnamon and honey. But the cooking method worked great. In the past I have found that the carrots take too long when roasting.

Our fourth and final dish was dessert. My husband’s favourite dessert is lemon meringue pie. So I found a recipe for Lemon Meringue Ice-cream Pie. It was soooo good. This is probably one of my favourite desserts ever. It was not part of our wedding dinner, but it sure did finish off this meal great.

I am curious what others do on their anniversary. Do you have a favourite meal that you make? Or do you go out to eat? We did that last year for our 20Th Anniversary. I usually have a hard time eating out due to my celiac and allergies, so it is usually easier to make meals at home. To be honest most of the time I find it tastes better than most meals we eat out for. Most restaurants do not have gluten free and allergy friendly menu’s so I usually end up having a salad out. Sometimes you want more than that.

I hope you have enjoyed a view of our wedding meal. I have included printable recipes for you to make. The best part of our dinner this year was the table setting. As our children have gotten older and moved out, we have become very prone to eating our dinner in the living room in front of the television. So to keep things special I spent a lot of time decorating the table.

Being able to get creative with the table setting is lots of fun when you let your imagination go. I started with a white tablecloth laced with fine gold threads. I then topped it with a lace table runner. My place settings consisted of a white china plate topped with a plate from my newest collection.

They were then topped with the prawn cocktail dishes. I have a beautiful set of bronze cutlery that I used. My Mom got it for me years ago from an estate sale. And finally I used a tall wine glass for our wine and a chunkier glass for water. I used some vintage white napkins that I found at the second hand store. The final touch was some copper candle holders and my usual table accent which is the silver candelabra I put together last year.

My extra little romantic touch was to tie rosemary hearts to the back of the chairs. I do not drive so I usually try to find a different way to say I Love You to Bill.

I don’t know about you but when I set the table special, the food tastes better. I am not sure why, I think it is because our minds tell us it is more special. Do you have favourite dishes to use for your table scape?